Gateway POS fail to start up

[370forlife]

In my computer tech class we got these old gateways to take apart and put back together. Mine wasn't working before we took it apart, failed to start up altogether (as in no response at all from power button,) took it apart and found that someone left a screw under the motherboard shorting it out. Put it back together, now it powers up.

Just there is no post and no HD activity. Tried different video card and ram. If I remove the PCI sound and lan card, the computer will not power off if you hold the power button, and the light flickers a little. If you put them back in, it acts just like normal but still dosen't post. Tried removing all cd/dvd/floppy drives.

Motherboard is a intel made motherboard, the VRM caps are nichicon PW, not really any other caps anywhere else. PSU is a newton with nichicon and Panasonic caps.

I'm thinking its one of the following:

Bad motherboard
Bad processor
no bios clear jumper

Didn't have time to check for these things in class, and we got our IBM's that we will be using for the rest of the year (and be able to take home at the end) so we won't be tinkering with these gateways until we bust them out to mess with things that we wouldn't want to do with our good computers. We put our names on ours, so I should be able to fix it next time we bust them out.

[NxB]

Re: Gateway POS fail to start up

no bios clear jumper

Quite possible, take one off something else and connect it. Some mobos clear the cmos with no jumper connected and won't start up. I would check the manual.

I've had some problems like this before which went away as soon as we swapped the power supply. Fans would spin and drives would start but there would be no video.

[ratdude747]

Re: Gateway POS fail to start up

maybe th3 sh0rt fr13d s0mth1ng. sorry for the leet, but i just had to write it that way when im talking about a hardware-hacked computer.

try the jumper... maybe bad ram. try removing and replacing the ram chips- it could be seated wrong. check the slots for damaged pins.

unlug EVERYTHING expept for:

front panel (power switch, etc, no usb, etc)

power supply

cpu/cooler

ram (one stick, if you ahve more than one, rotate them each time but one stick at a time)

vid card (if none is on-board

monitor

keyboard

unplug the rest, inlcuding pci cards and drives.
see if it posts, then gradually plug things back in until you get a no post, then you have a culprit. if it does not post at all, then you have to start playing part-swap with a working machine.

hope that helps.